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Paul Dinello on the set of Strangers With Candy.

I don’t know exactly what I’ve learned as a first-time filmmaker because I’m not officially one yet. I’m only about three-quarters of the way through the process, but if there is one thing that occurs to me looking at myself sitting in front of an editing bay at 11:40 p.m. it’s this: who is that guy and what the hell happened to him? Please tell me that’s not me, that some ragged refugee just shambled off a rusted VW bug hastily lashed to oil drums in an attempt to flee a small failed Caribbean republic and has taken shelter in the comforting warmth of the Avid. My God, somebody get that man a cup of coffee, or a down pillow.

Sarah Clarke, Laura Dern, Steve Coogan and David Sutcliffe in Happy Endings.

Happy Endings was a discovery in letting go of a lot of the paraphernalia of filmmaking. My d.p. (Clark Mathis, who is also a director in his own right) and I abandoned traditional coverage. What a relief it was not to re-create a scene 20 times for that establishing over-the-shoulder close-up stuff. We also banished video village; if anyone wanted to see what we were getting, they had to buy a portable TV receiver and tune to a specific UHF channel...which occasionally merged into Telemundo. (I stood by the camera and tried not to get knocked over by Clark.)

As a result we had time to rehearse — even on a 30-day shoot — and only went into overtime once. We had time for the actors to get another take if they wanted, or to suggest changes to their blocking in the middle of a scene (we knew we would be employing jump cuts, so we didn’t worry about matching). We had more time for the actors in general, and the photography of their work, instead of all of us racing to get our matching angles.

Clark and I also fought for a digital intermediate, which allowed him to light faster and cooler, and which gave us tools in post far beyond what would have been available to us in photochemical grading. A cool set is a wonderful thing. On previous films I got tired of walking onto the set and fighting my way towards the actors through dolly tracks and flags. This time I wanted the biggest thing on the set to be the actors. So dollies were also banished, and Clark handheld 98 percent of the movie. Hard on him, great for everybody else (except our focus puller, who thank God was the best I’ve worked with).

The end result: we were free, and more importantly we felt free, and I think it shows in the film.

RICHARD SHEPARD
(writer-director, The Matador):

I wrote the movie for myself. The last spec I wrote didn’t sell, and believe me, I wrote that one to sell for a million fucking dollars. So I was broke again, and pissed, and I just wrote a movie for myself. A movie that was outrageous and would never get bought. I was prepared to make it on my own. Raise a hundred grand or so, borrow a digital camera and film it in Mexico.

I had made movies like that before, and I loved it. And then the strangest fucking thing happened. People read The Matador and actually thought it could be made for real bucks. Now, this is the movie I thought would never sell, unlike the movie I wrote that was going to be sold for a million bucks and completely tanked. So my agent got it out there, and we got offered $75,000 grand for a one-year option from this company. Let’s call them Stanley Creek. Thing was, they didn’t want me to direct. Didn’t even want to see my other films, which I thought was just fucking rude. They just wanted to option the puppy for a cool $75K, get me to take everything interesting and dangerous out of the script, then get me the hell out of there and get an A-list director to hack it out. Now, the money offer was coming at a good time, and it was only a year option, but I turned them down. Turned them down for one dollar. These producer brothers who made The Cooler loved my script the way it was and were jacked to have me direct it. Thing was, they offered me nothing up front but one single dollar bill. No large cashola for the man. No guarantee that the movie would be made. Just passion and the commitment to let me make the movie I wanted to make.

What did I learn on The Matador? I learned to follow my heart. To hold true to my beliefs. To direct my own goddamn script even if it fucking kills and bankrupts me. So I told those Stanley Creek guys to shine on, and then a week later Pierce Brosnan reads my script as a writing sample and suddenly wants to star in and co-produce my film. Suddenly my fucking movie had that elusive Hollywood heat around it, and we’re deciding who we’re gonna let finance it. From 0 to 60 in about a week. From schmuck to “schmuck with James Bond” attached to his script. Psych.

The funniest thing? Stanley Creek hears we have Pierce Brosnan and suddenly they watch my other films and decide I’m okay to direct the movie after all, and now they’d like to fully finance the film and pay me a shitload of cash. Can you believe this shit? Can you believe their gall? Once, every goddamn few years, you can say “Fuck you,” like we did to them, and smile, and know that you’re right. That life’s good. That sometimes the scary choice is the best choice. That if you’re gonna direct, then goddamn direct. Whether it’s on digital or for several million. Whatever you can get. Just don’t work for assholes. And don’t sell your soul if your soul is in your movie.

Ellen Page in Hard Candy.

Hayley was a serial killer, like Hannibal Lecter, only much younger. Everything was black and white, I had a hundred notes, and from the official green light we ended up with only three weeks’ preproduction before we started rehearsals. Here what seemed so rich on the page seemed to have occasional stumbling “movie beats,” and as we found them we eliminated them, one by one. The movie I had in my head was being revised, over and over, the months of prep jettisoned and rewritten, and I was getting three to four hours sleep a night.

None of this was Brian Nelson’s fault. Brian had written the best film that I had read since moving from London to Los Angeles two years earlier, and that film remained intact until the end of postproduction. It was Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page’s fault. Ellen brought a personal vendetta to the character. She was human and in that reality was a spine-tingling power. Now all kinds of shades of gray began to enter our dark shadows and white highlights, things you don’t see in storyboards and can’t prepare for in notes, things that needed rewrites that Brian was happy to do, and things that just had to be done by any means necessary.

DAVID LACHAPELLE (director, Rize): Shooting Rize has changed my life. It began as a film about a raw underground art movement featuring an insane, dynamic fight dance. But it became more. I was allowed complete access to these kids’ lives for two years. And while I documented their sexy, frenetic dance, I was also invited to record their inspiring, unbelievable personal stories. If the film has one ounce of the heart these kids have, I’ve succeeded.

director David LaChapelle

How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer

What I learned is that I still have a lot to learn. That the more you can surround yourself with people who not only love and care about the film you are trying to make but who care about you, too, the better off you will be. That if you think, even for a moment, that someone you are contemplating working with, whether an actor or a grip, might give you trouble on-set, then they will give you trouble on-set. That people’s generosity never ceases to amaze me (Elizabeth, Lucy, my family, and Somerton, I’m talking about you). That there’s always at least one bad guy on-set — don’t let that person be you.

MARK BROWN
(writer-director, The Salon):

One of the great things about independent filmmaking is that you have all of the control. One of the bad things about it is that…you have all of the control. What was most surprising for me being writer, director and producer of The Salon is having my producing hat tell my directing and writing hat that there are certain things I have to cut and that there are certain things I can’t have.

So often, filmmakers fight with the studio to maintain the creative integrity of their work, but when you’re wearing all of those hats it’s an internal struggle that you wouldn’t believe.

All in all, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It was a great experience. And I have more of an appreciation for the difficult decisions that studio executives have to make now.

Wall

It’s been more than 20 years that I am filming in Israel/Palestine. After each film I say, “That’s it, I won’t make another film in this tragic, cruel and insane place. After each film I feel that films are useless.”

And yet, I made this new film, Wall, and although I see it as a desperate film, each time I show it in public and do Q&A’s, there is at least one spectator who stands up and says that this film gave him hope because there is so much beauty, love and pain in it.

I don’t know why beauty, love and pain give hope to people. But I suppose that these are the reasons why I’m doing films. We have plenty of beauty, of love and of pain in the Middle East. So probably, after all, Wall will not be the last film I do there.

Murderball

(co-director, Murderball):

Mark Zupan, the quadriplegic star of our film who plays rugby in a wheelchair, joked when we met him that he loved “his ass-level view” of the world. We tried it, and we agreed.

The ass-level view became part of our aesthetic. Whenever possible we shot the film while sitting in a wheelchair or from wheelchair height. We used spare wheelchairs the way other films use dollies, pushing and rolling our way all over the world — USA, Canada, Sweden, Greece — through bars, high school reunions, strip clubs, bathrooms, rugby tournaments. While shooting from two wheels we learned firsthand the obstacles one faces in a world of the two legs — overgrown tree roots, narrow doorways, confused bus drivers, shithead bouncers. From the beginning we wanted to make a documentary that was as thoughtfully framed as any feature fiction film, and the low-level tracking shots helped us capture spontaneous action cinematically. The only drawback to the wheelchair shots were the passersby who kept stopping us to ask how we’d injured ourselves.

DANA SHAPIRO
(co-director, Murderball):

Making this film forced us to reevaluate our own body parts. It made us really appreciate, say, our trapezius and our splenius muscles. No two quads are the same, and they’re always talking about how much “function” they have. So we began looking at our bodies as parts rather than wholes. Sometimes we’d rank our various limbs and ligaments from 1 to 10, like, What would you rather have: Hands or feet? Biceps or triceps? A thumb or four fingers? Stuff like that. We learned of a rivalry between quadriplegics and paraplegics. Team USA player Scott Hogsett summed it up in the Phoenix New Times. “Paras think they have it so good because they have full use of their hands,” he said. “They hate us quads because we can get boners and they can’t. Frankly, I’d take a boner over hands any day.” No arguments there.

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